ESXi 5.5 introduces a new Native Device Driver Architecture Part 2

Following up from Part 1 where I provided an overview of the new Native Device Driver architecture introduced in ESXi 5.5, we will now take a deeper look at how this new device driver model works in ESXi. A new concept of driver priority loading is introduced with the Native Device Driver model and the diagram below provides the current ordering of how device drivers are loaded.

As you can see OEM drivers will have the highest priority and by default Native Drivers will be loaded before "legacy" vmklinux drivers. On a clean installation of ESXi 5.5 you should see at least two of these directories: /etc/vmware/default.map.d/ and /etc/vmware/driver.map.d/ which contains driver map files pertaining to Native Device and "legacy" vmklinux drivers.

Here is a screenshot of the map files for both of these directories on an ESXi host:

The following inbox Native Drivers are included in default installation of ESXi 5.5:

Device

Device Driver Name

Emulex 10GBe NIC

elxnet

Emulex FC

lpfc

LSI Megaraid

lsi_mr3

LSI mptsas

lsi_msgpt3

Micron SSD

mtip32xx_native

QLogic FC

qlnativefc

SAS/SATA

rste

vmxnet3 & graphics

vmkernel

As I mentioned earlier, Native Drivers by default will always load before vmklinux drivers, however if you need to perform some troubleshooting, one option is to disable the specific driver in question by using ESXCLI which is applicable to both Native Drivers as well as vmklinux drivers.

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William Lam is a Staff Solutions Architect working in the VMware Cloud on AWS team within the Cloud Platform Business Unit (CPBU) at VMware. He focuses on Automation, Integration and Operation of the VMware Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC).